BloomReach Adds 4 New Metrics to Measure Page Quality

BloomReach announced today the release of its “Continuous Quality Management” (CQM) technology, which aims to automate web page optimization and user experience through the standards it sets for quality content.

Co-founded by an ex-Googler and search quality team member, BloomReach and its CQM technology has been used in house for years, but now, it’s available to customers everywhere to apply to their own sites.

CQM is a quality assurance algorithm, of sorts, based on data the company has collected and analyzed over “four years and a 150 million pages,” said Joelle Kaufman, head of marketing at BloomReach.

Kaufman explains need to be able to measure quality on an ongoing basis:

“There’s a lot of characteristics of quality,” Kaufman said. “What there hasn’t been – other than whatever search engines might be using on their own – is a way for a marketers to be measuring it.”

The company gives an example of where this new technology can be useful, saying “a category page launched with 10 products with every product matched to the category can become low quality if some of the products quickly go out-of-stock or are discontinued.”

Kaufman said BloomReach has measured hundreds of metrics to find out which metrics are the best predictors of a “happy” user experience, and which metrics correlate to what a human user identifies as quality.

The metrics the company has set for quality are as follows:

Content: How well the content on the page matches what the content is supposed to be about from the title and the header.

Uniqueness: How unique a page is relative to other pages within the site.

Flux: The rate of change of the content on the page and its impact on quality. This measures quality when content is added and taken away. “In the world of ecommerce,” Kaufman said, “flux in constant.

Here’s a screenshot of the CQM dashboard and its metrics in action:

The scores are based on how the web page in question acts relative to other pages across the Web with similar types of content. It goes beyond just the keywords and looks at all content elements on a page, including what the intent of the page is.

The content on the page undergoes continuous analysis by CQM, to ensure it’s always meeting all the metrics set for the page. BloomReach customers can set thresholds for the metrics, and decide what action they want to apply to pages that meet or fall short of those metrics.

For example, if a page falls below a certain threshold for the metrics that are most important to a business, CQM users can set a rule to de-index that page, or if the page isn’t live yet, it can be rejected. The only metric the page needs to be live for in order to measure is behavior.

When asked where the human element comes in, Kaufman said, “What the machine can’t do is create content. Machines are pretty bad writers.” Kaufman adds that BloomReach customers are also the ultimate decision-makers in the direction of the site.

Sometimes all the metrics will be stellar, Kaufman said, but it’s the people that are able to express judgment about whether a page looks good or the category name truly conveys the products on the page.

So where does BloomReach envision this technology within an SEO team? “I would imagine the SEO team are the people who are going to set the thresholds for quality that they find acceptable,” Kaufman said.

If you’re not familiar with BloomReach’s other offerings, it includes technology that interprets consumer demand (e.g., search volume, activity on the sites, purchase data, activity on the web, and other factors) and optimizes pages using existing content and, if needed, suggests new category pages for product-to-attribute pairs (e.g., a dress plus attributes such as color, style, material, etc.).

BloomReach cites that seven out of every 10 queries online are long tail. This technology aims to become a part of that search behavior.

For example, if your site has inventory of black A-line dresses but no specific page for it, and data shows there is a demand online: “black A-line dresses,” BloomReach technology will pull together a page of all your black A-line dresses.

Customers don’t have the ability to choose where the page lives on the site; the technology decides the most relevant place on the site the page will be linked to.

“There’s no change to the navigation. There’s no change to merchandising, “Kaufman said. “It gets added in naturally in a way that the consumer would hope to find it.”

So, what do you think of this new CQM technology by BloomReach? Will it help you do your job better?